What science conceptualises technology perfects

Life changing technology of 2010:

Charmaine Fernando

Science and Technology is advancing at the speed of light that what is discovered today as the most amazing innovation is bound to go obsolete in no time as yet another astounding gadget fills the void. The second millennium will go down in history as the millennium with an enormous number of life changing discoveries in a man’s life time.

There are too many to describe. The speed at which the innovations are output is simply amazing that what became news yesterday goes obsolete tomorrow. Science has such a powerful recipe for perfection; technology the muscle to deliver the end results. Man is made to optimize on the usage.

New gadgets are taking shape at science laboratories and factories overnight. New concepts are coming out of production lines at lightening speed that before the consumer gets an opportunity to savour its magic, the new and improved version pops out. Science and technology is the magical essence that changes lifestyles wholesale.

Its not that men and women maneuver science and technology to make their lives richer by the hour; like it or not, what has become the order of the day is that people are made to follow blindly where science and technology confidently leads them. Now, the inventors have become the subjects, yeah?

Displax’s Multitouch Skin

Imagine 9.7-inch iPad display is all the touchscreen you would ever need? A Portuguese company Displax would like to challenge that notion.

The company says it is bringing to market a multitouch capable, super-thin polymer “skin” that can be applied to any material - flat, curved, opaque, transparent, you name it - creating a digital muli-touch surface virtually anywhere, from a wristband to a desktop to a pane of clear glass. Wow! Now that’s what we cal wisdom in innovation.

Imagine 9.7-inch iPad display is all the touchscreen you would ever need? A Portuguese company Displax would like to challenge that notion. The company says it is bringing to market a multitouch capable, super-thin polymer “skin” that can be applied to any material - flat, curved, opaque, transparent, you name it - creating a digital muli-touch surface virtually anywhere, from a wristband to a desktop to a pane of clear glass. Wow! Now that’s what we cal wisdom in innovation.

Based on capacitive technology used in other higher-end touchscreen devices, Displax claims its product will work on large displays (50 inches or larger) and track up to 16 fingers through a grid of nano-wires, making it ideal for public places where more than one person is seeking information from an interactive display at the same time.

The company expects it will be able to track even more individual touch points as the technology matures. ‘Amazing!’ is not enough to describe science in all its multifaceted glory!

Not only is the sensor sensitive to touch, but Displax claims that it can even sense when you blow on it. We’re not sure what the future applications are for such technology, but we’re tickled that it’s possible. Even cooler, I guess that the impossible is just a ‘blow’ away!

Displax aims to market the technology in July of this year 2010, primarily for displays, ranging from 7 inches diagonal on the low end to 3 meters at the top end.

The producers report that it will be a stand-alone product; the multitouch sensor tech is of limited use, but given the right deals with display, it could be flipped into some very cool devices.

Next to plastering these on basic LCD screens, what possibly can’t you do? Imagine interactive tabletops? Imagine what might line up sidewalks and street corners. Just you wait until July; for July is a month for magical innovations to bloom and ripen! The company plans to ship the product with a free applications bundle that will allow customers to display media streams, access social networks and pull up Google Maps with the multitouch skin right out of the box. Absolutely out-of-the-box ideas,yeah? Now this screen is taking ‘the touch’ beyond privacy, opening doors wide for new opportunities up the street!

The iPad

The unveiling of the Apple iPad could be the opening phase in a transition that could change the face of personal computing as we know it. Its sudden peak in to the world of future computing has startled the computer world. Possibly it scares Bill Gates under the table at which he sat feet up! Technology has its extraordinary style of turning tables on the least expected moments on the least imaginable people! So much for the iPad!

Now, before we say hey presto iPad has landed on our laps! Ooops! On our desktops! Apple’s redesigned touch-enabled iWork office suite may seem like an afterthought, but more than anything else on the iPad it’s indicative of how we’ll use computers in the future.

In Pages, formatting text cleanly and easily around graphical elements has been made easier with touch. Once tapped, pictures and charts can be moved, resized, rotated and masked with finger swipes, pinches and twists, as the text instantly and naturally wraps around them.

Once a graphical element is touched, a contextual box can be summoned to the surface with another tap offering options unique to that element, such as its layering position, size, and the like.

The potential available once clicks and drags are replaced by our natural inclination to touch and interact with our fingers was immediately apparent.

Keynote provides a similar interface for composing presentation layouts, which are more graphically intensive and thus even better served by touch.

Added to the mix is an intuitive way to rearrange sides individually or in batches with taps and swipes. And while spreadsheets may be the least exciting runt of the litter, one thing touch certainly improves is navigating to or selecting multiple cells in the document; tap, and you’re there.

With the iPad, they’ve uncharacteristically provided the option to attach a physical keyboard.

Paired via Bluetooth or connected to the dock, a keyboard solves the problem of awkward text entry - and ties you to a desktop, creating a hybrid machine that’s 90 percent touch, 10 percent traditional desktop PC or laptop.

The iPad, then, is a transition to a future when, in Apple’s mind, multi-touch is so good that we no longer need anything but a screen. Apple obviously has a vision of the future for which they’re smartly and methodically laying groundwork.

And once the text input problem is solved hyper-accurate handwriting or speech recognition, perhaps, you can bet that’s the future we’ll have.

Olympics and thought-controlled computing

It wouldn’t be the Olympics without distractions; the 2006 Winter Games in Turin had their Austrian doping scandals, and the most recent Summer Games in Beijing were punctuated by an epic opening ceremony followed by rampant media censorship. Not to be outdone, Canada’s Bright Ideas installation will allow visitors to the upcoming Vancouver Games the chance to control lighting installations at major landmarks in faraway Ontario using only their thoughts. What colour are your thoughts? Never mind the colour, just light up the world with colour; Light up your mind with positive thoughts!

Billed as the largest thought-controlled computing installation ever created, Toronto-based InteraXon’s Bright Ideas showcase will tap patterns in users’ brain waves to control massive lighting arrays at Toronto’s CN Tower, Ottawa’s Parliament Buildings, and Niagara Falls. Participants wearing a headset in Vancouver will be able to see the monuments via video link.

Changes in their brain wave patterns will be sent instantly over the Web to manipulate the lights in Ontario more than 2,000 miles away.

Now that’s what I call remote controlling technology as per your whims and fancies!

While this might sound alarming to the tinfoil-hat-wearing set, InteraXon’s rig doesn’t actually read your thoughts.

Rather, it picks up on the larger changes in electrical patterns in your brain, electrical patterns that resonate outside your head, using an electroencephalograph or EEG. So while the device doesn’t know if you’re thinking about the color red, the color blue or how you thought the CN Tower was in Seattle, it can tell if, say, you are relaxed or concentrating hard. At least, that’s the idea notes a website.

Generally, manipulating EEGs can be pretty difficult and unreliable, which is one of the principle reasons you don’t control your PC with your thoughts; rather not yet.

So when InteraXon’s system translates your changing brainwave patterns into binary code and feeds them to the computer, it might be your conscious thought shifting that tower from red to orange to violet, until you begin to think pink, and it might not. But that’s not really the point, is it? The colors are changing! In Toronto! The feeling is good to imagine you are finally controlling technology for a change!

Scene - Stealing 3D Technology in Avatar

It is the genius of one man and his ingenuous team that brought to light amazing lifelike animations that made the audience spellbound and be one with aliens. How he saw the big picture and perceived and understood the audience point of view is exceptional.

How he remote controlled the emotions of the audience at every move is astounding. He holds the onlooker in suspense, breathless with expectation with the unexpected. It was worth the wait. Avatar will go down film-history as an unmistakably remarkable tale retold in the most technologically-sophisticated medium of our times.

James Cameron decided nearly a decade ago to film his humans-versus-aliens sci-fi adventure Avatar in 3-D, but he refused to start production until technology could convince the viewer that he or she could step through the screen and pick up a bow alongside the Na’vi, the film’s 10-foot-tall, blue, cat-faced alien protagonists.

To give scenes realistic depth, Cameron, who brought a computer-generated liquid-metal T-1000 to life in Terminator 2, and camera whizzes Vince Pace and Patrick Campbell built the Pace/Cameron Fusion Camera System to capture images the same way as a human eye does.

Cameron then used a virtual camera to walk or fly around in the virtual world to record any shot of the Na’vi that he wanted and combined that with the real-life footage. Here, a guide to making the most convincing 3-D film yet.

How James Cameron made a truly lifelike 3-D movie

It is the genius of one man and his ingenuous team that brought to light amazing lifelike animations that made the audience spellbound and be one with aliens. How he saw the big picture and perceived and understood the audience point of view is exceptional. How he remote controlled the emotions of the audience at every move is astounding. He holds the onlooker in suspense, breathless with expectation with the unexpected. It was worth the wait. Avatar will go down film-history as an unmistakably remarkable tale retold in the most technologically-sophisticated medium of our times.

1. Build the Stage

An array of 72 to 96 cameras, depending on the size of the set, hang around the perimeter of a sound stage and are configured in a grid. Later, a computer replaces the studio walls, floor and ceiling with digitally rendered three-dimensional environments and structures. The grid is also marked on the floor to provide reference within this virtual world.

2. Capture Motion

Actors, weapons and props marked with reflective dots move around the stage while the camera grid tracks only the dots. A computer records the dots’ movement, triangulates their location, and assembles these data points into wire-frame skeletons that in Avatar will be dressed with computer-generated Na’vi bodies.

3. Shoot in 3-D

Next Cameron films the flesh-and-blood characters in 3-D so that they will look at home alongside the Na’vi in the virtual 3-D world. Older 3-D tech used two cameras mounted side by side to create a left eye/right eye effect. Because of their bulk, those cameras were placed far apart and could shoot only straight ahead.

The Fusion Camera System has two cameras, but by using small high-definition digital image sensors, the lenses can sit closer together than your pupils. The line of sight of the lenses is adjustable so that, during a shot, they can be angled closer together to focus on nearby objects, or farther apart for those in the distance, just as your eyes do. The system combines the images into a single image with realistic depth.

4. Climb into the movie

After a computer inserts the motion-capture performances into the digital environment, Cameron carries a virtual camera’ an LCD display with buttons and grips similar to a video game controller onto the set. As he moves, radio and optical detectors track the camera’s location and relay it to computers offstage, which render the virtual world as viewed from that vantage and send it to the tablet. This allows Cameron to walk through the virtual action to record any shot he wants’ he can even set the vantage point to take shots that would require a crane or helicopter. Later, the 3-D footage of human characters can be added to these scenes.

5. Watch it

At RealD 3-D shows, a projector alternately displays the left-eye and right-eye images, each in an oppositely circular polarized direction, 144 times per second. Polarized glasses ensure that each eye sees only the image meant for it.